The Paradox of Forrest Gump

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotHoudini

In TvTropes archives, under the section for "Idiot Houdini" we have this entry:

"Forrest Gump... ...He fumbles and stumbles through life pursuing on a whim whatever seems like a good idea at the time, yet nothing he ever does throughout the film leads to negative consequences for him."

I have to disagree with it. A great deal does go wrong for Forrest. He meets with great success and great tragedy. He is violently bullied as a child. Loses a close friend in combat in Vietnam. Has a difficult and troubled relationship with the woman he loves, which often places him in violent and dangerous situations. Loses his wife to illness and has to raise his son alone.

I want the reader to pause for a moment and imagine this life again, but told through different eyes. Your childhood friend and pseudo-sweetheart is sent into foster care because her father is sexually abusive. She is expelled for posing in Playboy, and ends up bouncing from bad situation to bad situation. You do well in College playing football, and would probably drafted to the NFL, but are instead drafted into Vietnam. There much of your squad is massacred, including your closest friend. You manage to save some of your squad and your commanding officer- but he ends up crippled and traumatized with PTSD and caustically blaming you because he wanted to die. You find a talent for table tennis and are used by the military as a political show piece. You eventually do meet your childhood sweetheart and marry her, only to discover she has a terminal illness and you have a son you'd never met before. Also this happens around the time your mother dies. Keep in mind you never knew your father. Through luck and circumstance, you made it rich due to a natural disaster; another case where, like in Vietnam, you were rewards while those around you suffered.

Told through any other eyes, the tale of the life of Forrest Gump would be a tragedy on a scale with "The Great Gatsby" or "Citizen Kane". The Key difference here, is Gump's perspective. Now, we know that Forrest Gump is cognitively disabled to a certain degree. But, and this is key, so does he.

Two key points in the film make that clear. The first is his declaration to Jenny that "I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is." The Second is his fear, upon meeting his son, that Forrest Jr. may share his disability: "He's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen but is he smart or is he - (Places hand on chest).."

Forrest is not smart, but he is self aware. The deaths of Bubba, and Jenny and his mother all show that he is not incapable of experiencing sadness or despair. His generosity to Bubba's mother, and Lieutenant Dan, and his bulldozing of jenny's childhood house show his understanding of the troubles of other and of his empathy and compassion.

Forrest could easily have fallen to the same despair that afflicted Dan and Jenny. He had the capacity, the film makes that clear if we look- he chose not to do so. And in so doing he lifted up and redeemed those around him, Dan and Jenny in particular.

Forrest Gump isn't some idealist who believes unflinchingly in some divine plan, as evidenced by this quote:

"I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floatin' around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it's both."

Forrest isn't an Idiot Houdini in this film, he's an anti-nihilist. And just maybe, he's a living Buddha.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheAntiNihilist

With us or Against us

Here's a great lie and a great secret. This is perhaps the most important secret of the Hungry Empire, certainly it is the most important secret of the Men of Black and White.

They want you to believe, as heroes are often told in tales, that if you are not one of us, you are one of them. They want you to believe that that whole of the sleeping Flock and all of the Stillborn Army are Men of Black and White in waiting- ready to pounce or betray at a moments notice. They want you believe that only you few who are already awakened are on your side in the fight.

They want you to feel alone and isolated. They want you to feel as though the vast unawakened majority are a vast ocean through which they can swim and through which we must fight.

They are wrong.

The Song of All

Nothing begins because nothing ends. Before we were, our parents were. Before our people were, there was an older people. Before humans were, there were other species. Before life was, the earth was. Before the Earth was, the sun was. And so it goes back. But it never reaches silence, and it never reaches a beginning.

Because, before this universe, this song of one existed, there was something else and something more. We cannot see or hear beyond the boundaries of this song- but we know that there is more. We know that there are other songs. Before and beyond the bounds of the one song there is all songs.

But we do not know what that is. And so we can say all this simply.

In the beginning there was Mystery, because nothing really begins and nothing every really ends.

This does not explain things, but it allows us to sing our song, our one song. And this is all we can do. We are bounded by the notes and verses of our song, we sing the lyrics and make it real. We are all so very tiny against the vastness of our one song, that even contemplating it is too much for us, but every one of us sings that song and every one of us is part of the performance. Some parts are larger, but all parts are so very very small- and yet, despite all this, every part is required. Every portion essential to the whole.

And so we sing.

In the beginning there was Mystery, because nothing really begins and nothing every really ends.

If you like this,
you can support Professor Harbinger at https://www.patreon.com/profharbinger

Mnemonic Cholera

I am not old. I am ancient. My body is a very reasonable thirty seven years old, give or take the replacement of atoms and the time I spent in the womb. My mind, is other than that. I have been sentient to a varying degree for those thirty seven years previously mentioned. But through story, I have expanded the scale and scope of my mind like a blossoming fractal rose. My mind expands forward and backward in time. My mind grows towards possible consequences and sees alternate paths that never were and many that never will be. My mind, driven by knowledge encoded in story, and urged forward by a driving curiosity, is an eldritch abomination- a thing beyond space and time that reaches out towards the heat death of the universe and the earliest rumblings of the big bang and ties them together and then casts them apart. My mind is a monster god and a forgiving angel. My mind is a visionary and a tyrant. My mind is a child and a lunatic, a messiah and an untouchable.

Why do I say this? Not to brag. My mind overflows, my brain often insufficient to contain it. I create art, I pour my mind onto the page. I see and I rant and rail and write and draw, in a desperate attempt to get some of my mind out of my brain and relieve the pressure. But there is another pressure: the pressure to learn more.

And it gets too much, and its hard to hold it all alone. And so I need to share it. Like mnemoic cholera, transmitable and prone to cause those infected to expell the infected contents themselves. Charming, certainly.

Allegory of the Whisperer

Excalibur in the Rust, Mythopoetic Design

Excalibur in the rust.

The concept of a mystic artifact, and one neglected is too universal to neglect. My wife has suggested the concept of a Mystic compass. Diviner's pendulum hanging under a gyroscope compass. Maybe with sextant. I like this, traditionally this is a sword or a weapon. I love the idea of something used for navigation and exploration as a cultural artifact.

By contrast we have Mistletoe. The Scythe of the Locust King is a corrupted sickle. Forged when the false king took the mirrored mountain and transformed it into the glass tower